He dropped out of high school, sold drugs, did a stint in culinary school and then spent several years working in kitchens throughout the city, including his father’s bar and restaurant in Forest Hills, Queens.
The show is about the guys traveling around the world, bonding with each other, eating really good food at locally owned places (in very copious quantities), getting into the local culture of wherever they are, smoking weed and having fun. There are six or seven episodes as of now, I've watched six. (There are more on You Tube where the show first ran.
The best episodes are the one in Morocco, and the one in New York (Note: corrected from earlier when I referenced this episode as being filmed both in London and New York. That's a different one. I meant the episode filmed entirely in NY, I think it's number three) The Queens part of the New York episode -- especially the King David's Bakery (aka Tandoory Bread) is really interesting.
Three of the guys (Action, Meyhem Lauren and Big Body Bes) are big and fat. They are diverse and multi-cultural and supportive of each other. They use profanity in their music, but they seem like very nice guys and are very polite with the restaurants and tourists. I can't even imagine the advance work the Network had to do with the restaurant and market owners to prepare so much food for Action and friends who wolf it down.
There's a bit of a Diners, Drive-in and Dives' feel to it at first, but that goes pretty quickly. Action is a bit more articulate than Fiore. Also, there aren't many cooking lessons and the guys really explore the other cultures they visit.
Interestingly, one of the guys (Big Body Bes) has some kind of legal issue (here's an interview with him when he got out of jail) so he couldn't go to Canada or London with the group because those countries wouldn't let him in. They filmed without him, but then added in segments of what he was doing in New York so he didn't get left out. (He was able to go to Morocco and Amsterdam.)
Another Viceland series is States of Undress, which uses Fashion Week in odd places (Pakistan, the Congo) to opine about women's rights (gay rights, everybody's rights.) I'm not crazy about the host, a model who used to be advertising director for the Paris Review (according to them, others report she was an editorial director). For example, I did not find it amusing (and in fact slightly insulting to the store owner) when she was trying on a burqa in a store -- she was buying it so she'd have something appropriate to wear when meeting with an Islamic cleric -- and she came out of the dressing room with a "Da Da" and her arms outstretched, asking how she looked while batting her eyes. She is not as cool or pretty as she thinks she is. (Action and his guys don't pretend to be cool, they just are.) [Added after episode 3: I've changed my mind about the host of States of Undress. She's really grown on me. And the show offers a glimpse of life in countries I'm unlikely to visit and otherwise wouldn't otherwise get to see. It's as much about social and economic injustice in these countries as it is about fashion.
So, apparently Viceland doesn't care about ratings (Vice is a billion dollar parent company)and is just having fun with the TV medium, hoping to bring "personal stories." I'm not a big documentary fan, so these "reality trips" are more watchable and interesting to me. But I don't really get what makes one person's stories "interesting." Maybe if I keep watching, I'll figure it out.